


To Be Touched

by xel



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, Soulmate AU (by which I mean a not-soulmates au)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-13
Updated: 2017-11-13
Packaged: 2019-02-01 16:07:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12708348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xel/pseuds/xel
Summary: Given prompt by an anon: "Our soulmate tattoos don't match, the universe is telling us that we aren't destined to be together" "I don't want some destined or fated soulmate I have never met, I love you. Please, let's make our own destiny"Angela’s own soul mark is right above her left collarbone, rarely visible, and distinctly placed enough that she thinks she will be very aware when someone touches her there, and so when Fareeha grabs her by the wrist, smiles, and lightly tugs her towards the precipice of a null almost a full year after they meet, Angela doesn’t notice that it’s confirmation that she is not Fareeha’s soulmate either, Angela doesn’t even notice it is the first time the other woman has ever initiated a touch.“This time next year, I will fly,” Fareeha tells her and grins.She’s been recruited into the Egyptian military (Ana had not been pleased). They all know, Fareeha will be a great pilot. They watch the setting sun from their perch with smiles.Angela is 27 and Fareeha is 22 when the universe definitively concludes they are not meant for one another.





	To Be Touched

**Author's Note:**

> Originally I was going to post this in my pharmercy one-shots story, but I liked it quite a lot and so wanted to post it separately.
> 
> Also, how do titles even work??? I don't know.

Angela meets Fareeha when the other woman is 21, and she is 26. It’s a transitional time in Angela’s life. It’s grad school, it’s too much coffee, it’s the daughter of her mentor; a chance encounter where Fareeha bumps into Angela and their differences are stark, but then ... friendship has bloomed in odder places.

Honestly? It is persistence, mostly. On Fareeha’s part. A fondness for new experiences and home on summer break, herself, in college, Fareeha walks into the Overwatch facilities most mornings with her mother, bickering like they do, and finds Angela by early afternoon.

They talk as Angela sorts through files (an intern task, but someone must do it, sometimes Fareeha even helps) and they eat lunch together (sharing pudding cups and lame jokes), and explore the campus, and it is all very nice.

The first time Angela touches Fareeha, it is a hand on the shoulder to get the younger woman’s attention a few days after they meet, and because Fareeha’s soul mark is so unequivocally unignorable, Angela knows they aren’t soulmates, even before she analyzes the fingerprint in any sort of database.

That is the nature of soul marks: a thumbprint, someone’s thumbprint, etched onto the body of their soulmate in the first place that thumb ever touches them. Fareeha’s soul mark is right below her right eye, as if her soulmate had been trying to brush away tears.

It doesn’t bother Angela that they aren’t soulmates (at least, not at the time) they’re new to each other, to start with. All the same, she supposes everyone recalls the first time their thumb brushes another person, with just that little bit of anticipation … that they’ll withdraw their hand and there the mark will be, where it has always been, unnoticed until just then.

Angela’s own soul mark is right above her left collarbone, rarely visible, and distinctly placed enough that she thinks she will be very aware when someone touches her there, and so when Fareeha grabs her by the wrist, smiles, and lightly tugs her towards the precipice of a null almost a full year after they meet, Angela doesn’t notice that it’s confirmation that she is not Fareeha’s soulmate either, Angela doesn’t even notice it is the first time the other woman has ever initiated a touch.

“This time next year, I will fly,” Fareeha tells her and grins.

She’s been recruited into the Egyptian military (Ana had not been pleased). They all know, Fareeha will be a great pilot. They watch the setting sun from their perch with smiles.  

Angela is 27 and Fareeha is 22 when the universe definitively concludes they are not meant for one another. 

 

* * *

Some people want to _know_ , and the Soul Searching Database is there for them. When Fareeha joins the military they fingerprint her for service, and ask if she’d like submit to Soul Searching as well. Fareeha says no. The technician gives her a strange look, but the conversation stops there and she moves on. It's personal.

When her squad mates get drunk one evening and suggest a trip to a data portal to have their soul marks scanned, Fareeha says no to that as well.

Some people like the idea of the surprise; and her friends assume that is what Fareeha is waiting for. She lets them. After all, what can she truly say? That she is terrified of the possibility that everything she is and was and will be is pre-determined? It is supposed to be a blessing: to never wonder if there is someone out there for you.

Fareeha wonders sometimes if her soulmate also avoids the database; submitting and searching … or if she is just breaking the heart of someone she is supposed to love.

She brings this up with Angela when they talk one evening over the phone. Fareeha's cleaning her gun as they chatter, and she mentions her buddies going on and searching the database. Two of the three had recorded matches. Angela laughs lightly over the connection and Fareeha gets the impression it’s at their good fortune. After a time, she tells Fareeha this:

“Fareeha, I do not think it is unreasonable to want a little wonder in life,” A pause, and then eventually: “That is why the database isn’t mandatory.”

“But is it not selfish? To delay the inevitable, hoping to outlast fate?”

“If it is, then we are both very selfish people,” Angela says, and Angela is the one person Fareeha knows who can smile through words.

“Then I guess it isn’t; after all, you are the least selfish person I know.”

“Flatterer,” Angela teases and Fareeha grins and does not deny it. 

 

* * *

Fareeha leaves the Egyptian army at 28, joins Overwatch at 32, eventually moves in with Angela at 33. It’s affordable this way, and after ten years of knowing, visiting, loving one another it is a reasonable course of action.

Fareeha is making popcorn in the kitchen when Angela yells from the other room:

_“At First Sight?”_

Fareeha does not respond, and Angela accurately takes the silence as rejection. She wanders into the small space and holds up the very archaic DVD case (it must have cost a small fortune, but Angela is a romantic comedy fiend…)

“It’s a classic,” she argues, reasonably.

Fareeha pours the popcorn into a bowl, pretending to contemplate the option, and then plucks one kernel out of the mass and flicks it at Angela playfully. It falls from Angela’s surprised face to the floor harmlessly and Fareeha chuckles as she glides around the Swiss doctor back into the living room.

“I will watch it, but only if I am allowed to lay across the couch.”

This of course means that her legs will be in Angela’s lap (they’ve only got the one couch and an ottoman for seating accommodations) and that Fareeha will likely fall asleep at about the same moment the two protagonists fall in love.  

“Will I ever get you to enjoy rom-coms?” Angela sighs dramatically, following Fareeha into the living room. Fareeha turns over her shoulder to flash Angela a grin. Angela’s heart stutters, something feels off, and then the moment passes.

“Will I ever get you to enjoy rock music?”

They've reached an impasse.

“You can have the couch,” Angela finally says, letting the jovial bickering pass.

They settle in. Fareeha’s head is up against the armrest, her legs draped over Angela’s thighs, as they pass the popcorn bowl back and forth. To her credit, Fareeha at least attempts to stay up, but she is asleep at about 40 minutes in. Angela wouldn’t have been truly annoyed even if it weren’t the case, but Fareeha only returned from a week-long mission this morning, so Angela is feeling extra forgiving.

Uninterrupted, and unabashed, Angela watches the younger woman for maybe longer than she ever has before. Not looking for anything in particular, but she still finds the thumbprint under Fareeha’s eye again. She has looked at it a thousand times before, when it was unmarred, and a thousand times now, cut by the lines of the eye of Horus. It is hard to ignore, so prevalent and on display - harder now, when Angela wants to believe so bad that it is wrong.

How can she love Fareeha so much, and be told that that love is nothing?

When the movie ends, Angela doesn’t bother going to her room, nor does she bother waking up Fareeha to tell her to go to hers - and the next morning, eating pancakes with cricks in their necks, Fareeha only teases her for promoting bad self-care.

 

* * *

Angela falls in battle and Fareeha watches it happen. It is perhaps the single most terrifying moment in Fareeha’s life.

There's blood like rain, and no pulse. Fareeha cries. Fareeha never cries.

Sitting at Angela’s hospital bedside two days after the fact, Fareeha remembers the Overwatch agent who had traveled all the way out to Egypt to tell her of her mother’s MIA status, and this feeling of helplessness is a nightmare echo of that day.

She supposes the uncertainty of the future without the people she loves in it is the crux of that crippling fear, and it is at about the time this thought crosses her mind that Fareeha realizes: she loves Angela.

It seems silly that it never occurred to her before, given how obvious it feels now. But then, Fareeha has always been a particularly awful brand of bad at reading emotions; her own or others.

(Perhaps that is why she had avoided the Database, the registration, touching Angela that very first year they knew each other. Somewhere, somewhere deep down, she couldn't help to think that maybe the universe had been wrong).

 

* * *

“I love you,” Angela tells Fareeha over brunch a couple of months later, out of the blue. Fareeha blinks, sets down her toast. “I have for years, and I haven’t said it before, but I do.” Angela draws circles in the precipitation on her glass with her thumb, and like everything about Angela, her eyes do not waiver, and they are breathtakingly kind.

Today her shirt falls off of one shoulder, and Fareeha can see the print there; the soul mark. Angela has spent a decade staring at a similar one across the table, unhindered.

“I love you, too,” Fareeha admits, but adds: “our soul marks don’t match.”

“So?” Angela responds, her tone is dismissive; despite the world’s best intentions, this does not deter her.

“The universe is telling us that we aren’t destined to be together,” Fareeha says, but the words sound bitter in her mouth; what right does the universe have to decide, after all.

Angela watches her with soft eyes, and when she does speaks, she is more serious than Fareeha has ever seen her. “I don’t want some destined or fated soulmate I have never met,” she says.

“I love you,” she says.

“Please,” she says:

“Let’s make our own destiny.”

And so they do.

 

* * *

They get a dog who chews up couch pillows, and a cat who lets that happen, they get married and baffle all of their friends, they get into fights about whose turn it is to do the dishes, and why the DVR stopped recording Fareeha’s nature documentaries and where all of Angela's hair ties have gone (this happens around the same time Fareeha starts to wear her hair up).

They get to be in love.

It is perfect, and wonderful and the best ending … and the best beginning.

 

* * *

Years and years and years later Fareeha is older. Angela is older, the world is older, and they are _happy_ when Fareeha meets Akila.

Akila is sweet, beautiful, full of warmth; she is a photographer, an activist, and fiercely ecstatic when Fareeha bumps into her in the market, grabs her arm to steady her and mutters an apology with a sheepish grin. In mere moments Fareeha can see how it would be so easy to love her.

When Fareeha retracts her hand, there is a thumb print on Akila’s arm right below where her hand had been.

The pause is long and heart wrenching; aching, Fareeha realizes, it is a sort of aching loss.

And when Akila moves to brush away the tears streaming from Fareeha’s eyes seconds later, something that has never happened before, suddenly does: the thumb print there wipes away with them.

_"Let's make our own destiny."_

**Author's Note:**

> After I posted this story I had another anon that asked that I explain the ending, as it was/is unclear. I provided this explanation - hope it helps!
> 
> Anon: "Uh, could you explain ending of not soulmate au? What does wipe fingerprint mean??"
> 
> Response: "The fingerprint (soul mark) that disappears when Akila wipes away Fareeha’s tears is Akila's own (it was the mark that had been below Fareeha's eye throughout the story). 
> 
> I wrote that Akila 'wipes it away' as an aesthetic word choice, to mirror the literal action, but really what happened is that it vanished on its own when Akila went to dry Fareeha’s tears. The symbolism is that Akila is wiping away her own importance as Fareeha’s soulmate from Fareeha’s life by wiping away the tears (an action that is one part resignation and one part acceptance of the fact that Fareeha did not wait for her). In a broader sense: that Fareeha’s choice to be with Angela, nulled the encounter and touch of the soulmate fate had given her.
> 
> Fareeha was crying because she recognized that Akila was supposed to be her soulmate; but she’d already made a happy and fulfilling life with Angela. She was going to have to break Akila’s heart."


End file.
